Time: 5:00 PM, Thursday, December 8th, 2005.
Place: Room 202, ECE Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark NJ. Directions

 Abstract

As product lifecycles are getting shorter and shorter, manufacturers are facing a great deal of economic and political pressure to reclaim and recycle their obsolete products. Disassembly, as one of the natural solutions, is of increasing importance in material and product recovery. However, this process is fraught with many uncertainties (e.g., variations in product structure and condition, and human factors). The development of an effective modeling and management tool for such involved factors is very critical in moving disassembly towards a more efficient and automated regime. The proposed approach undertakes this problem. More specifically, a fuzzy Petri net model is introduced to explicitly represent the dynamics inherent in disassembly. Instead of presuming the pertinent data in the model is already known, a self-adaptive disassembly process planner and associated computationally effective algorithms are designed in a way to: (1) accumulate the past experience of predicting such data, and at the same time, (2) exploit the “knowledge” captured in the data to choose the best disassembly plan and improve the overall disassembly performance. To ensure the robustness of the learning procedure, variable memory length is further introduced. The proposed methodology and algorithms are illustrated through the disassembly of a batch of flashlights in a prototypical disassembly system.

Biography

Dr. Ying Tang is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rowan University. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Northeastern University, P. R. China, in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and Ph. D degree from New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, in 2001. Her research interests include modeling and scheduling of computer-integrated systems, Petri nets and applications, Reconfigurable systems design, hardware and software co-design, software security, and Networking and communication. She has led and participated in several research and education projects funded by National Science Foundation, Lockheed Martin Corporation and US Navy (NAVSEA). Her work has resulted in over 50 publications and one book chapter. She has chaired several technical sessions, and served/been serving on organizing and program committees for many conferences.

For Further Information: Contact Timothy Chang (973)596-3519, changtn@njit.edu.